


there's a flaw in my code

by taylorswift



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Making AOU Make Some Sort of Sense, Project TAHITI, TAHITI Protocol
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 08:05:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4738937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylorswift/pseuds/taylorswift
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Truth is a fickle thing in a world of gods and monsters, and there are no options left after New York but to rewrite the truth; erase the demons that haunt Clint, and to give him a new life, one that he'll be happy with. That sacrifice comes at a cost for Natasha, who has only ever wanted to tell him the truth, the truth that she can't tell him ever, and is trapped behind a white picket fence with a new addition to the line of secrets she'll have to take to her grave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a flaw in my code

He’d almost killed himself.

He’d almost killed himself and his condition was deteriorating. Those were the words she’d heard over the burner phone, before she snapped it clean in half. She was following blindly on sent coordinates, trying her best to stay on the road and keep the speedometer under ninety. It wouldn’t be as bad of a ticket if a cop saw her, anyways.

The arrow necklace resting in the hollow of her neck was choking her as her mind raced. _Clint had almost killed himself. It was an accident, but it wasn’t. Too many antidepressants that the SHIELD doctors had prescribed for him after New York, too much drinking to numb the rest of his brain, and it had almost been too late. Clint had almost killed himself, and he’d almost made full on it._

She should have known better, she thinks, than to believe him when he said he was fine. Just because he’d passed a psych evaluation courtesy of SHIELD’s finest, just because they had cleared him didn’t mean that he was fine. She should have known better than to leave him alone. Leaving him alone was the worst possible idea, not this soon after New York. Not this soon after waking up to realizing his nightmare had only been reality and living with a suffocating guilt.

He’s been moved to one of SHIELD’s satellite medical facilities, and she arrives in a gust of wind as it moves quickly underneath her feet. No one dares to deny her where she wants to go, and as if they’ve been expecting her storm of an arrival, are quick to point her in the right direction.

Fury’s already there, waiting outside the room with his arms folded neatly as he stares at the glass. Natasha all but runs up to the window of his room herself, eyes flitting around wildly as she tries to get a glimpse at him. It’s worse, worse than she could’ve imagined. The arrow necklace feels like an anvil.

“Who found him?” she asks, eyes glued to the glass barrier separating her from Clint. She knows she won’t be allowed in to see him, no, not after a near suicide. It might as well have been SHIELD protocol. She’s bound to standing outside of the room, looking at what little of him she can see through the half-lidded blinds with a lump in her throat.

“Girl named Kate Bishop,” Fury says, and immediately Natasha winces. _Anyone would’ve been better than her_ , she thinks to herself. “You remember her?”

The words trap themselves in her throat next to the breath that she’s holding as she stares at him through the glass. Natasha’s seen him in hospital beds plenty of times before, something that might as well be a common occurrence and expectancy in their line of work. She’s seen him with dozens of broken bones and bruises and IVs hooked up to him, tubes breathing for him, stitches barely holding him together, the whole nine yards. This has to be the scariest, since there are no physical injuries. He could easily be sleeping there as he would at his bed at home, only with less coffee stains on the sheets.

“They pumped his stomach a little less than an hour ago. We didn’t call you until we knew he’d at least make it through the night.”

“You can’t keep prescribing him medications,” she accuses as she tries to suppress the anger that’s threatening to choke any last ounce of sensibility she’s got holding her upright and steady. “You know they’re not helping him.”

“That was the doctor’s mistake. Medications are the farthest thing from our idea of treatment now,” Fury says. “It’s gone too far.”

She laughs but she doesn’t mean to; it comes out just as scathing as she intends for it to be. “Nice to know you agree.”

“He wasn’t stable the first time we let him go. You know that we have to keep this from happening again. We can’t let him leave until we know he’s capable of functioning.”

She doesn’t argue with that, because she completely agrees. She can’t bear to think of any other episodes like this; she can’t even force herself to think of what could happen if she got a phone call saying that he was roaming some back alley of Manhattan in a full-fledged state of depression, if she got the phone call verbalizing her one true fear. The thought of thinking of it sends shatters of glass to her already aching lungs, and she has to pull herself from a destructive state of mind.

“What do you know about Project TAHITI?” Fury breaks her train of thought, and he’s suddenly speaking a new language to her.

Natasha combs her memory, but nothing. She would have remembered a TAHITI when she read over every SHIELD file that there was on the database, she would have remembered seeing the name when she memorized every word that was archived. “TAHITI?” she reiterates, and he gives a stiff nod.

“It was the plan we had set in place for any mortally wounded Avenger during battle.” She can pick out a few fuzzy conversations about said plan, and although it had never had a name tacked to it, she’s got a little idea of what he might be talking about.

“He’s not mortally wounded,” she points out. “He just had his stomach pumped thanks to an overdose. I hardly see that as something that calls for a Band-Aid.”

She must not be getting his point, judging by the disappointed and slightly frustrated look on Fury’s face as he sighs. “When we did research for Project TAHITI, we found that in order for the project to run smoothly as a whole that there were certain protocols that needed to be instated. TAHITI protocols, if you will.”

“And this has anything to do with Clint how?”

Fury turns to look at her, the look in his eye grave. “Romanoff—” he starts, as if he's warning her that what he has to say won't be what she wants to hear. It won't be an easy fix. There's never an easy fix, there's never a fix, period. Not even SHIELD could slap on a bandage and make all their problems disappear. She wasn't kidding herself, thinking there could be a miracle like Fury was assuming she was; she knew that hope would be minimal the minute she walked in.

“Tell me.”

He resumes his explanation, any begrudging behavior evaporating early on. He trusts her, and she knows this. There isn't a more suitable candidate for him to tell and potentially get his ass locked inside the Fridge for life for doing so, because she's the person that would take it to the grave. “One of the TAHITI protocols involves the replacement of memories, removing all of those that occurred during the full procedure and anything that the doctors don’t want their patient remembering and giving them something more pleasant to recall once they wake up.” It takes only a beat for Natasha to pick up on what he’s hinting at.

“They could take Clint’s memories from New York,” she breathes out.

“Not take,” Fury is quick to correct. “It doesn’t work like that, Romanoff. It’s not that simple of a procedure, it’s not how memory removal works. They replace the memory with another to fill in the empty gap that they can’t find any alibi for.”

“So we could _replace_ his memories,” she says as she tries to understand what it is he’s saying. “He wouldn’t remember Loki possessing him, he’d remember…being on the beach somewhere. He wouldn’t have all those memories, all the guilt eating him alive. It’d be like he was right there with us instead of on the opposing side.”

“Essentially, yes.” Natasha feels as though she’s run too quickly with this, as Fury’s uncharacteristic silence starts to trouble her. Her eyebrows meet in the middle of her forehead, scrunching together.

“You’re hesitating,” she accuses. “Why?”

“There’s only been one other success in the project. It’s just as likely that he’ll categorize along the failures, seeing as how we’d only be implementing a TAHITI protocol and not the entire procedure.” She wants to strangle him for suggesting such at thing, but letting her emotions override the better of her is not an option.

“You said it yourself, we have no choice. We take this and pray to whatever god that we can find tuning in on the other side that it goes okay, or we leave him alone and make funeral arrangements within the next month.”

“So you’d be willing to hold his secret?” Fury asks. “You’d be willing to green light this if we could get it arranged?”

One of her shoulders falls in an indifferent shrug, her point of focus turning back to the only man that means something to her lying in metaphorical fragments under a thin hospital sheet. “We’d be fools not to.”

“Or vice versa,” he points out.

“What do you mean by holding his secret?” she pries, imploring more. Her mind is already made up, but it never killed to know what minefield she was placing herself in the middle of.

“You could never tell him. Never tell him what really happened in New York, never tell him about Loki, never tell him that he almost died from a handful of pills and a little too much liquor. You’d have to put on your biggest and brightest show smile and act like everything’s fucking dandy. You’d be the one paying his war debts, Romanoff. He’ll never know what he owed in the first place.” He’ll never know about the SHIELD agents he put down, he’ll never know how he sold out SHIELD to the enemy, he’ll never know about he nearly flattened the Helicarrier and the ground underneath it. Clint will never know how he nearly brought about the end of the worlds as they knew it. “No one will; no one but you.”

Natasha’s response is steady, as if she’s been in this situation a thousand times before now. “I’ve been paying off war debts for a long time. What makes you think another will break me?”

“Because it’s his.”

From the corner of his eye, she sees his head turn to look at her. As if that makes a difference. As if knowing that it’s got anything to do with him will make this any more complicated, will make her decision that much tougher. As if putting one more weight onto her shoulders, one that belongs to him, will bring her to her knees. Pressure has never scared her, doesn’t he know that?

“I can live with that,” she says. She’s not quite sure if she means that, but the sooner she says it out loud, the sooner she’ll learn she has to.

“You’re not going to like it,” Fury warns her. “You won’t be allowed in the procedure. You won’t be allowed any insight on his procedures after, ever. I won’t even be able to tell you the name of the nurse that gave him an ice chip afterwards.”

“I don’t care.”

“Natasha.” Fury’s voice is softer, as if he’s got an ounce of sympathy buried somewhere inside him and he’s using it on her.

She turns to look at him, her eyes steel. “I _don’t_ care,” she repeats, just as hard as the first time. Although with this response, she’s trying to resist the burning sensation building up behind her eyes, the urge to be sick. In truth, she cares, cares too damn much even, but if Natasha Romanoff was anything, she was damn good at selling a lie.

If she didn’t know any better, it was like he was trying to quickly talk her out of the decision she’d just made. “People have gone insane because of this,” he says with a sense of urgency.

Natasha looks and feels like she could circle her hands around Fury’s neck and choke the life from him at any given second. “I’d rather him be insane than dead.” She knew how suicides worked, she knew what it felt like to give up and be inviting of something like death. Once you made your mind up, there was no changing it overnight. He would try again, try again until he succeeded.

“Coulson’s gone,” Fury states. “He’s got no family left for us to consult. I wasn’t going to approve anything without letting you have a say in this, he’s your partner and ultimately, you’re responsible for him now.” She feels her heart beat, this time leaving an actual ache when it does so. “It’s up to you, Romanoff.” The one last warning, to make the right decision or be forever haunted by a mistake.

She thinks of when he was sent to kill her, dropped down on her knees in the most vulnerable, submissive position there was in her mind with blood running from her mouth and his hands around her neck. She thinks of how she looked up at him, same steely glaze of determination in her green eyes as she all but begged for him to finish it. Natasha knew that there was nothing left if she lived, she’d only be hunted down and killed in every way she could have possibly feared, and at least dying at the hands of some stranger seemed like it would be a more decent way to go.

She thinks of how he refused, how he knocked her out cold and she woke up in a SHIELD infirmary thousands of miles from Moscow. And then she looks past the blinds, at the broken man in the hospital bed on the opposite side of that window, and she knows she can’t let him go. She’ll do whatever it takes.

“Do it,” she says, her voice brittle as she tries to keep the stitches from tearing just a little longer. Her eyes are locked on Clint, stomach in knots.

_Please forgive me._

_Please forgive me, if for some reason you remember any of this._

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this post](http://mrgaretcarter.tumblr.com/post/127200435915/some-of-nats-faces-during-clints-family-reveal) and a little nudge from some very special people. Chapter title comes from Halsey's "Gasoline".


End file.
